The increasing bandwidth over the air interface between a wireless server and mobile device has permitted the delivery of video, audio, and other content to cellular telephones and other devices. In the case of digital broadcast video delivered to handheld devices, service providers have been increasingly able to deliver multiple channels of small-screen content to cellular telephones with greater channel selections, resolution, and/or program variety.
However, the advent of multiple video channels on mobile devices and other clients involves some drawbacks or limitations. In the case of the Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) standard, for instance, several video services or channels can be broadcast at one time, using time-division multiplexing. According to DVB-H formats, DVB-H video can convey Transport Stream (TS) data for several services (e.g., TV Channels) over one frequency channel of approximately 8 MHz bandwidth (or approximately 20 Mbits/sec). A diagram of the time division of a conventional DVB-H broadcast stream is illustrated in FIG. 1. As shown, services (illustratively, five separate programs or services) are transmitted one by one in a time-multiplexed, or time-slicing, mode, where each program or service occupies one time window or slice followed by another program or service in time, in round-robbing or repeating fashion.
In a burst stream transmission such as a DVB-H video program, if a user watches a TV channel on service 2 and would like to change channels, or “zap,” to service 1, the user would have to wait until the next time slice or slot assigned to service 1 is received in the device, before the user could actually view that content. In practice, the distance between video bursts or frames would, on average, be about 2 seconds for that time slot rotation using DVB-H. This delay establishes a minimum switching or zapping time for this technology. Processing overhead in the device needed to decode the new selected channel adds more time to the switching lag, resulting in a total of 2-4 seconds or more of delay, while the user waits to view the new video channel or other service. This delay is sufficient to be noticeable, and possibly distracting, to many users. Improved systems for processing video or other burst stream transmissions may be desirable.